We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • wiggly

    Can I just say that the road from Busch to Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the most gratuitously wiggly route I’ve ever driven?

    Our route down from Kansas City was longer than I thought; place not blind trust in GPS routing, especially when you’re close to the edge of the maps you’ve uploaded. Due to one wrong turn on my part, we ended up in Overland Park, KS — rather than being on Hwy 71 all the way south. In future, I shall upload all the maps I need, plus all the states/provinces surrounding, so you don’t get that terra incognita/here be dragons feeling of falling off the edge of your wee scrolly map.

  • how irritating

    OpenOffice doesn’t import the EOMONTH() function from Excel spreadsheets, but knows what it is when you type it manually. C’mon, people, get hep!

  • very poor

    It just took my work computer more than 5 minutes to create a new folder on the desktop. How am I supposed to get my work done?

  • indigo’s most overpriced yet

    I saw the most obscene markup in indigo this evening: the Linux Format OpenOffice.org special edition was priced at a hefty $34.95. This costs £10 in the UK.

    The thing is, UK prices are quoted tax-inclusive. The ten quid you see is the ten quid you pay. Not so in Canada. In the most boneheaded move ever, our prices don’t include tax, so that $34.95 really costs you $39.84 (in Ontario, at least).

    According to Google, £10 is $20.53. Indigo’s markup is almost 100%

  • so-called wizard

    Windows has just spent the last 15 minutes searching for a driver for my Garmin GPS. Y’know, the one I use with the computer a lot. It’s claiming it’s new hardware, but in the words of Syd, “I’ve had it for months”. Oh Windows, you really are very stupid. In fact, you are a silly wizard.

  • it doesn’t get any better than 3D rainbow-effect Comic Sans

    billions of years of evolution culminates in this

    No, there is better. Much better than this.

  • whoa, I won something!

    My strategy of dropping off my business card at every trade show booth that promises quality swag paid off. I just received an MP3 player from Genivar – thanks, folks!

    It’s a weird little unit. Looks almost identical to a nano, but is your plain-vanilla USB mass storage device – something that Apple could learn from, but they’re in the business of selling players tied to iTunes. It also has a standard USB connector for days transfer and charging – Apple and iRiver please note.

    It seems it’s an S1 type player, so can play videos in its own weird format. It also has a voice recorder, which again records in its own special format (likely some hacked version of GSM).

    It will be fun playing with it.

    Update: Looks like it’s an ATJ-2135 Actions Semiconductor player of some kind. It can record in ADPCM wav (which sox can convert), or its own weird ACT format (which can be converted using this Windows-only program).

  • easily amazed

    I know the technology is not that nifty, but I amused and amazed myself by sshing into the home server whilst on the Via train somewhere between Smith’s Falls and Ottawa.

  • Koolu: low-energy computers

    Dave sent me this. It’s kind of what I’ve been trying to do with Mini-ITX for a while, but at a sensible price. I suspect the fanless Geode processor is slightly low in grunt, but it’ll do the job: Koolu.

  • not-so-smart meter

    We got our smart meter installed today. Unfortunately, Catherine didn’t quite understand why there was a knock on the door, then her computer went beeeeyyooooww … then all our clocks caught the <blink> tag.

    While I like smart meters, this one isn’t quite as smart as it could be. To me, a smart meter needs to have a big display of your current demand, and needs to be inscribed with a suitable message like “Quit using so much juice, you cretin!” It also needs to hook into local time-of-use pricing, which me being  green and a Bullfrog customer and all, I don’t get to take part in. Boo.

    But what could have really gone sideways was my own desktop, which was quietly chugging away installing Ubuntu 7.10. Since I started using Linux in 1995, I don’t think I’ve ever had a system upgrade go totally smoothly. This time, though, I was lucky – the system must have fully initialised before we lost power.

    I can’t honestly say I see any difference between Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon; they both are fairly pretty, and just work.

  • auto-CC’ing someone with Outlook

    If you’ve ever forgotten to cc someone on an e-mail and you’re forced to use Outlook, this could be useful.
    Real example: R is an external contractor. T manages R’s company’s account for us, but isn’t involved in all communications with R. By setting up an outgoing mail filter, I can ensure that all mail I send to R is copied to T.
    The Rules wizard lives in the Tools menu, and the option called (I think) “Rules & Filters”:

    setting up a mail send rule in Outlook

    This particular example is made more complex by R’s having two e-mail addresses. Multiple addresses in the distribution list become a logical-or, so it works out. I’m not sure if I strictly needed the exclusion clause to only cc T if T is not explicitly in the To: or Cc: fields, but it works.

    Outgoing filters only work if Outlook is running, so won’t work if you are not logged in.

  • Stupid HP!

    My printer required a software update to change a reference to an HP web page that had moved:

    stupid_hp.PNG

    Stupid HP! Don’t you know that cool URIs don’t change?

  • serene detachment

    The office network has been down all day. I don’t keep paper copies of anything. Therefore, today has been quite quiet, detached from everything.

  • largo

    I just installed IBM® Lotus® Symphonyâ„¢. I don’t have the pokiest PC on the block, but in order to make it run at any speed at all, you’d need to have a bit of grunt in your PC. My VIA SP13000 box takes a couple of minutes just to bring up the main window.

    To be fair, OpenOffice isn’t the fastest starter either; none of them have large bits of themselves running in the Windows system code, unlike MS OfficeThey both work, and are free – and Symphony looks a deal prettier than OpenOffice. As there’s no Mac version of Symphony yet, I’m unlikely to switch just yet.

  • unexpected beauty

    zv.png

  • how to get craigslist searches by e-mail

    1. Go to <http://toronto.craigslist.org/>
    2. Enter your search term in the “search craigslist” box
    3. When you get the results, scroll to the bottom. There is a final paragraph that says “RSS (?)”. Copy the RSS link address (move the mouse pointer over the RSS link, right click, and select “Copy Shortcut”)
    4. Open an new window (Ctrl-N in IE)
    5. In the new window, go to <http://www.rssfwd.com/>
    6. Paste the link you copied from craigslist into the “Enter a feed to subscribe” box – the link should look something like <http://toronto.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=this%20that&format=rss>, and hit Subscribe
    7. Enter your e-mail address on the next page – before you hit Subscribe again, you might want to check the preview of the feed that’s shown on the page to see that it’s finding what you want. You probably want to keep the e-mail type as “Normal – Send each update as individual e-mails”, and uncheck the “Share at Popular Feeds” page
    8. You will get a confirmation e-mail – hit the confirm link, which will take you to a page you probably don’t need to understand
    9. rssfwd should mail you within a couple of hours of new items being posted. Each e-mail should have unsubscription information

  • that’s just great

    I’m trying to book tickets for Catherine online at aircanada.com. The site does something bad in Firefox, so the helpdesk person said to use Safari (after suggesting “Tools -> Internet Options”, which in my case I have not got), which is supported. So on I go to the site with Safari, and I’m redirected to:

    Unsupported Browser Warning. We have detected that the browser you
    are using is not able to view some of the more advanced elements of our website, and may prevent you from completing your booking.

    Supported Browsers:

    • Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and above (Windows 98 and higher)
    • Netscape 7.2 (Windows 98 and higher)
    • Firefox 1.0 and higher (Windows 98 and higher, Mac OS X)

    Yup, so the browser I had been using is supported, but the one they recommended isn’t. After many retries (‘You failed to check Futile Checkbox #36, and therefore must restart your booking’) it finally worked. Took the best part of an hour. The booking is almost as bad as the flying.

  • obsolescence: the failing …

    One of my backup drives on the NSLU2 started to fail (it won’t always spin up), so I nipped into Canada Computers and bought a 320GB replacement for a moderate number of $. Swapped the old drive out of the Vantec NexStar case, and — nothing.

    Seems that the first-gen NexStars only support up to 250GB. Looks like I’m off to the computer store tomorrow.

  • thanks, spammer. thammer.

    A (now deleted) comment:

    hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments, I can help you with this problem. I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50%. In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it, its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory@yahoo.com, i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

    Gee, thanks, Richard! That would be so helpful of you!

  • Amazon.ca: view your gift certificate balance

    Very strange; amazon.ca doesn’t officially let you see your gift certificate balance (though they claim you can from the help pages). You can see your balance if you go here: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/css/account/payment/view-gc-balance.html. (You might want to copy the URL and paste it so you can see there’s no trickery going on when you are asked for your password.)

    This is just the amazon.com balance page with the .com changed to .ca, but there’s no link from the Your Account page.